Photography

The Brinton Archives

Materials in the Bradford Brinton Memorial Collection include numerous albums accumulated by Mr. Brinton as well as photographs by J. E. Stimson and Jessamine Spear Johnson.
Associated archival materials range from family photographs to pictures of African safaris and reels of film from local rodeos to adventures in Africa.

More than 2,000 nineteenth century photographs of the American West by important photographers of the period are represented in two recently acquired photography collections:

Photographs by well-known celebrated photographers such as William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan, Alexander Gardner, John K. Hillers, Joshua Crissman, and others are included in this historically important material.

Twenty-five photographs by the American photographer Alexander Gardner will be highlighted in a special exhibition on display in the S. K. Johnston, Jr. Family Gallery in 2018 to celebrate the historic 150th Anniversary of the Treaty of Ft. Laramie.

Please note that Historic Photographs in the holdings of The Brinton Museum are available by appointment for scholarly research.

A collection of 110 black-and-white documentary photographs of small town main streets, churches, grain elevators, steam trains, sweeping panoramas of farmland and endless skies, and the ‘salt of the earth’ inhabitants of America’s High Plains by the American photographer David Plowden was gifted to the permanent collection by the artist in 2016. An exhibit of more than fifty of Plowden’s photographs were recently showcased in David Plowden’s High Plains: Sixty Years of Photographs, on display in the S. K. Johnston, Jr. Family Gallery in 2017.